Austin Holmes on AI in PR: Automation Without Losing Authenticity and Accuracy

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Yes, you have to make it you, and you have to speak in your voice. That's the authentic that people sort out very, very easily. But you also have to make it intentional in what you're trying to say and who you're trying to say it to and what the outcome you're going for is. Without those elements, you're kind of speaking into the wind. And some people get lucky and they're like just telling their story and they're like, I want to do this. But that's part of the message is what, why, how, answering all the questions along the way.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I used to be a publicist as my full-time career, and I was telling Austin Holmes right before we jumped on that I interviewed his wife who has Publicity for Good. Heather DeSantis Holmes now, before she became a Holmes, I think. And so it's really fun to kind of come full circle and have you on the show, Austin. So thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's been a journey, and Heather has grown and developed, I'm sure, since you guys did a podcast. But like, we just hit 10 years in business, and I can't, I can't even remember when I started. So I know she is, uh, probably in the same boat.

So, well, most people in PR come up through journalism, communications. You actually came up through Naval Special Operations as an EOD technician. Yeah.

Not, not the normal pathway.

Yeah. So how does that happen and what do you think that your background gave you that helped you as an entrepreneur that a traditional path might not have?

So, I mean, going back even further than that, I went to school for entrepreneurship. And so it was in my life plan, if you want to call it that. But I wanted to serve first. And, you know, about half the guys in my family historically have been in the military. So like, it wasn't like everybody's military, so you have to go and honor your tradition. But it also was like, yeah, it's kind of a normal thing for us. And I had been part of an awesome team in high school, won a championship there, and I didn't have anything in college, so that was kind of the foundation behind looking for an amazing place to go. Well, yeah, serve on the one hand, but also be a part of like an elite team. And so I looked at all the programs, ended up joining under a Navy EOD contract and went through that pipeline, rolled a couple of times, but had a good experience. 2 years into that, went to San Diego and did my first deployment. But when I came back, I met Heather shortly after that. And I don't think I had ever thought about PR as a career. Probably even a year into us meeting, I was like, yeah, I, I mean, I, I can help with the business. Sure. I went to school for this and all that, but, uh, the things I started with were the things I was doing in the military. It was systems, it was process, procedure. And then, you know, an easy transition from there was hiring. Even though I hadn't done any hiring and I hadn't been a part of too many interviews before that, it was a people question. And so in our community, you have to interview people, essentially very different reason, but you're trying to dig into find what the problem is or find what the threats are. And that was what the business needed too. Adaptability is absolutely a part of that community. It's part of the military in general, but like really, really in EOD, we have to be able to adapt to the situation more than most people. And then we have to give guidance on that situation. It's not like, hey, we just have to handle this situation. No, you actually have to come up with a plan on how to not die based on whatever the situation is. And for us, that's a lot of different things. That, that community is super cool that they get to do all the fun stuff. I, I don't know how accurate this is now, but like when we were going through, statistically it was the second hardest physically and it was the second hardest mentally behind SEALs and then behind the nuclear program as far as fail rates through training. And, and so that gives you an idea of kind of what You need both sides of it for that job. But you know, in the military you learn how to work together as a team. You learn how to team build there. It's kind of subtle because it's just like hundreds or thousands of years of accumulated leadership knowledge that just gets poured into you pretty much from the second you join because there's a system for that. So some of the practical systems that I took were like how to write an SOP. Like that was very, very early on, but then we started building systems in just about every area of the business and the documentation side. The mission planning is what we would call it in the military, became the quarterly planning that we do now. It's a lot of the same principles, it's just applied to a different field.

Yeah. Well, in any business, publicity or anything else needs systems and processes. That's where failure comes in. So having your skill set is highly valuable because I have been the person, I've started businesses where it was very organic and grew, and then I was like, wait, wait, wait, but we need to go back and we need to create systems. We need to make sure that we're, you know, that everything that we're doing is mapped to an ROI and that we're budgeting correctly and kind of having to backtrack. And so being able to have that from the beginning, I'm sure was a huge area of support for Heather, um, and starting the agency.

I recognized the value of it, but I did not know how to build them. Like in the military, you have systems handed to you. You, you follow the chain of command, but they've been doing it for 20 years. In business, we looked to people who had been doing it for 20 years. And so we've learned from a lot of people since then, systems-wise. Like this is one of the early systems that we learned. It's like lead gen, lead nurture, conversion or sales. Delivery, and then retention, resale, upsell. Like, that's a fundamental way to split up the actual business functions. And we've had to build each one of those systems, and now we're at the stage that there are subsystems to every single one of those systems. And it's a forcing function when you start hiring people that you have to tell them what to do. And you can either spend all of your time telling them what to do and then following up and then making sure they did it right and holding them accountable for the results. Or you can build a system and they can follow the system. The principle I love that we are trying to get to now is like, hey, can you take a relatively unskilled person off the street, train them for a week, and can they do that position? Like, pretty much no matter what it is. And that's how we're trying to build our systems now. Are they there? No, it's But some of 'em are like individual job functions, especially the ones we have a lot of because we've seen so many people do it because we've seen so many people learn the process and develop the relationships in whatever area it is. Like we have timelines of like this. I, I can say during the hiring process now, hey, you're coming in, you're coming out of a communications degree, you've never had a position. It's gonna take you 2 years to, for this to be easy for you. Like, yeah, you, you understand your position, you've built some relationships, but it's going to take you another year building relationships with media to then execute at a high level where it doesn't matter what client you have. Because some clients are easier than others, whether it's their story or whether it's the industry they're in. It's going to take a while to develop relationships where you've worked with enough media members enough times that you can just like call them or text them or send them an email and be like, hey, can you really help me out with this client? I need to get this media secured this month, or like they have a launch, please help me. Those things just take time. And that's almost a personal system that they're building and we have a framework for it, but it takes time to develop those systems and then it takes time to train people on those systems. And I think that's a failure point of a lot of people, period, in business. Definitely see it on the agency side because, you know, we have agencies we work with for ourselves. And you can see the different systems that they have. Like I, I just went to the dentist this week and it's, it's incredible to see their systems. It's obvious that the team is trained. They have a language pattern that they all use, which comes from training.

I think it's really funny that you said dentist because I also just went to the dentist last week and my daughter went this week and hearing the language and the way that they all work together, it was very efficient. They really have it down and that's something that any business should aspire to. You talked about growth and hiring and all the different things and how your role has grown. You are president of Publicity for Good. You're also founder of SignalRaptor, which is your newest tech-powered PR kind of done-with-you subscription model. But you originally were starting this PR firm out of a 23-foot Airstream trailer and traveling around the country. So can you talk a little bit about that story and taking it from that into deciding where you're gonna hang your hat and then growing the business?

It's interesting, and a couple people have stories on this kind of thing, but when you change your environment, it forces you into making changes. And oftentimes in business, like you being put in a new environment as an entrepreneur forces you to grow. And sometimes that's revenue, but like there's so many other ways that you can grow as an entrepreneur and It's a lifestyle anyhow. But in the Navy, I had been to some crappy places and I wanted to go someplace awesome. So the first place we went was Bali, which was incredible. We went for 3 weeks. We wanted to go for even longer than that, but we had an event we actually had to come back for in the US. So after we had already shifted all of our stuff into the Airstream, I believe, before Bali. We made that plan to Airstream while I was on my last deployment and said, all right, what do we want to do when I get out? We're like, let's go figure out where we want to live. And the intention was to go find where we wanted to settle down with Airstreaming across the US, but we also wanted to see the cool places. And so we got to check out a lot of places, but unfortunately we started Airstreaming in like December, November, December of 2019. And so we got shut down pretty quickly. I think we made it through like 4 or 5 states. Started in Florida where I'm originally from, where my parents were, went to Key West, had a great time, and then started working our way up. And then we were in North Carolina somewhere, whatever that first week was. And I don't even know if we had, I don't think we had booked our next spot yet. And so we had wherever we were at for like a week, I think it was Statesville. And, uh, ended up finding out very quickly, like, hey, you have to rent, or you have to get a spot for a month because of the whole 21-day thing. And we're like, okay, well, where's awesome? So we actually went to Asheville, stayed there about a month and a half, right on the banks of the French Broad. It's gorgeous. And like, our weekly trip out was to Walmart. But at that point I had been helping here and there. I was doing some content stuff for us and doing a lot of the logistics legwork for the actual Airstreaming, because if you've never been on the road full-time, it, it's a process. But our Airstreaming shut down. Our business took a major hit in a couple days, I think, uh, definitely within a week. And so we said, all right, what do we do? We have to handle this situation. Luckily, we were in a coaching program with Alex Scharfen at that point, and he was ahead of the curve, to use the language. And so we got really good guidance. Did we do it perfectly?

No.

But I think we ended up that month higher than our projected because we just hustled. And that was the start of me working full-time and not just like here and there helping with the things. It was okay, Austin's fully in this cuz we don't have anything else to do. So, you know, we roll outta Asheville and I think we traveled a little bit more, maybe we had an event, but we ended up kind of stationary in Ohio for about 4 months where Heather's from, where she had gone to school. We were doing some real estate stuff up there and then by that point we were shifting to actually hiring people. Before that it was like you know, 2, 3, 4 contractors, couple people overseas, and okay, let's actually bring one of these contractors in full-time, become an employee. So there was a whole learning process with that. And over that 4 months in Ohio, I think we went from, you know, 1 or 2 employees to like 10. And we were pushing. I mean, it was like, hey, we're going to take this pause on our travels and really built. And so we had a lot of momentum coming out of those first couple months of COVID built the business up, and then ended up in North Carolina. We got married around that point too, so it was partly planning our wedding. We got married in Ohio.

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And then we ended up in North Carolina. We had explored mountains everywhere because we wanted mountains. We said, hey, where do we want to live, beach or mountains? Because we wanted to live somewhere people go to vacation, like, why not live there full-time? Uh, so we looked at— ended up— mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Went to like hundreds of small towns, I think, through the course of the second year of Airstreaming, and ended up in Morganton, North Carolina for about 4 years and loved it there. But it was a small town and, you know, we were continuing to grow and we knew we needed to hire. And, you know, in those 4 years, ups and downs, business is what it is, learned a lot of lessons. But we said, all right, what's the next step? We need to start hiring people. We need to start hiring a sales team. And so that was a catalyst behind the decision to move to Nashville. Cause we actually, we had been working in Charlotte a little bit cause it's about an hour away from Morganton. I had grown up in the Raleigh area, was not interested in going back to Raleigh. No offense, Raleigh, just been there, done that. And then, so we looked at the 3 major, or there's 4, but we looked at Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Nashville in Tennessee. When you look at the PR game, Nashville's kind of a clear winner there. Yeah. There's a lot of talent here. And so we've built our team here now and I think we're at 8 people in office and about 70 overall on the team.

Wow.

So, that's amazing. It's been a journey.

That's, yeah, 8 people in office and 70, you know, remote. That's incredible. And that really speaks to how you grew the agency really smartly. So let's talk a little bit about scaling Publicity for Good. You went from $12,000 a month to $163,000 a month in revenue. That's incredible.

That was the first time around. It's a little bit more than that now, but like part, part of the time in North Carolina, the business did take a hit. I, I had stepped away partially and started working on other things. That's where I actually learned to code though. So I spent 6 months learning to code, figured out I was terrible at it. Uh, and for the old project, I didn't ever end up finding a co-founder slash technical lead, depending on how that, how you end up structuring it with somebody. And so that project kind of ended up dying. Would've been great, but it, it was slightly crypto social, which looking back was probably a terrible idea. But, you know, that gave me the experience during that time period when we rebuilt, like that was kind of the first year of me coming back full-time. And rebuilt it to where we were. And so that was us doing the same things again. And just, I— so much of that was, hey, let's get the right people in place. It's so critical to have the right people when you're building a team. And that changes as you advance through different revenue levels. It's just the experience isn't necessarily it, but the different skill sets are needed as you go through and you have the option, you can develop everything and you can push really far, but that still only takes you to a certain level. Like you're still gonna hit another series of roadblocks. And, and, you know, to me, one of the best people talking about this out there is Brandon Dawson. He goes through the different breakpoints and it's very data-driven in his approach, which I appreciate. And, you know, common breakpoint kind of the million range. Like, so many people get stuck there, and that's a lot of like single-person shops, like dentist office, uh, doctors, lawyers. Like, they kind of hit that because they don't have the management ability beyond the 3 to 5 people they talk to every day. And that's a skill you have to develop. We took a long time to develop that skill. I think Heather and I had an advantage though because it was both of us working together in the business, and so we were able to focus on different things, to quote unquote work on the business and not in the business, while still not being good enough to take ourselves out of it. Now we kind of get told what to do, which is nice, but, uh, you know, you have to build that skill in your team, whether it's people you already have and they grow and develop. We've had that. Our operations manager is a great example of that. She started as Heather's person, or executive assistant, and now she manages half our team. And we've also gone and hired people. We hired a senior publicist as a PR manager, and she kind of manages the other half of the team. So literally the two of the main leaders in our company are from different pathways. So whether you go— whether you train that skill or go and find that skill, you do need it as you progress. And you know, we're kind of at the next breakpoint. And so now we're having to figure out, hey, what do we do next? Because like, being transparent, our big weak point is sales. Like, Heather can sell and she's effective at it, and we know her numbers. And now we have to figure out how to build that team up. So yeah.

Yeah. Well, and let's talk about the type of clients you work with, right? Publicity for Good. So purpose-driven brands. How do you stay in your lane and what are the mistakes that you see agencies do? Because I know it, for me, I also, when I was doing just straight up PR, I worked with purpose-driven brands and then it, there's always the, oh, but should I bring this other, should I say yes to this other client? Even if they're not quite aligned because of the revenue and I feel like that never works out, but I'd love to hear your perspective and some of the things that you've seen as you've gone through this work over the last 10 years.

I think for us, we're lucky that we have our name. It, it holds us to certain things and all of our messaging, all of the stuff we talk about in the PR world of putting the right message out to the world. So much of that for us is the purpose-driven side. And so that's who we attract. Like all of our marketing is around, hey, what are you doing? And, and so that's the question we get to ask, which is different than a lot of people. It's, hey, are, is this person doing something good in the world? And that is pretty common. It's become way more desirable both from the founder standpoint and the consumer standpoint. And so we built the business in the consumer product goods space, food and beverage, and then that expanded a little bit, had some beauty and fashion. And we still have that as the base of our business. But, you know, we, we started getting other people who still had the purpose-driven element, but we're in different industries. And I don't, we've probably been in like 12 to 15 different industries with specific clients. The other thing that we actually made a mistake on is everybody says niche down and you need to look at the data behind it because your agency might not be successful because of your, like, if we had only done food brands. Yes, you, you can do that, but it's gonna take you so far and then you're gonna run into issues. And this is our experience. For us, we had been working with a lot of personalities, influencers, authors, speakers, and because everybody's like, niche down, like, all right, let's get rid of the side of the business and just focus on CPG. And this is part of the, like, the down dip period is we did that and it did not work because we needed those personalities to do the referrals. So when we look back at the historical data a year and a half later, I'm like, why is everything falling apart? It's because most of our CPG brands were associated with one of those personalities.

Oh, interesting.

And so looking back at all the historical clients said, we need to bring this back. Like, we're handicapping ourselves. And they work really well together. Like, they're tied in. Like, almost every brand has a personality associated with it, and almost every major personality has some kind of brand that they have. Like the top ones being like Ryan Reynolds with Aviation and Mint, like, but that, that's such a common practice and those brands do really well because of that like symbiotic relationship. And so we added that kind of back in first and that helped us grow. We improved a lot of process stuff, brought in new team members and, you know, got us back to where we were before. And The next step was we started getting these 12 different industries along that pathway, still mostly on the purpose-driven side. And the other industries kind of presented themselves to us. One of them was actually a lo— like, we met her, she was in Morganton, we met her there. And so it was just like community, but that was in the interior design space, and that went really well for us. And we got a couple interior design clients as a result of that. And then that That kind of triggered one. We were growing and we're like, we're emailing all 60,000 CPG companies, so who can we email next? And the follow-on to that was like, let's take a very measured approach. What are great industries to be in? What do we have experience in? Tech is listed in that. We've done a little bit of tech before. We don't want to do tech. Not that we won't take a tech client, it's just that's not what we're great at. And we're gonna tell 'em that, like, hey, if you wanna build your personal brand to build the tech company all day long, are you a tech company that does PR? We know that pretty well now. So it, as we grow, that portfolio of industries will probably grow. But two that we've identified that we've built and are, been very effective in are finance and legal. We did have, like years ago, we had a legal client that we loved working for. They were very purpose-driven and it was a veteran-associated brand. And so we had multiple ties, but we got them so much media. And honestly, it's a lot like doing nonprofit work, which we've done a fair amount of as well, especially on the purpose-driven side. So finance and legal became the two new verticals, and now we're growing those segments of the business. And it's, as I'm sure you can imagine, both of them have significant impact. And so it's been cool to play in those spaces, and there's a bunch more on the horizon. Maybe we have one or two clients in these niches, and it's just, okay, the foundational question going back to that, for us it is, are they doing something good in the world? Because we want to be able to talk about that.

Absolutely. Can you talk about the importance of the founder's history, the founder's backstory? Uh, because obviously yours is interesting. The story of how your organization started is a really great story, but what takes that from being, cuz you, you did just mention like you're happy to do personal brand for a founder in tech, although tech is not your jam, but what makes a backstory useful as part of a PR strategy versus just something that's an interesting tidbit?

Yeah, it, and not everybody approaches this, this way cuz like look at the tech space since we're there. Sam Altman has a really good backstory. Like, he has multiple founding things. I believe it was YC. I think he was at YC for a while. And so, like, he's got this cool backstory. They don't talk about it that much. People bring it up because he's so high profile, but, like, OpenAI is not built around that. I think it comes up more for Elon Mm. Because he's even higher profile and he's involved in so much and he's like everywhere. But that founder story is so powerful because it creates a relationship with people. And no matter what you're building, people being able to relate to a human at that organization or a group of people, it doesn't have to be a single individual when we're talking about the backstory. There are lots of examples of either a team coming together and building something, or the founding group, if we want to call it that. A lot of nonprofits are actually are more group founded than individual founded. I, I might be way off on that, but it's, hey, how can we get a group of people together and move in a positive direction? But the, the story is what you can tie everything else into. It does make it interesting. It doesn't just add flair. It, it's the baseline that you build from, just like you're building your business from yourself and building a team around you. Building the story by starting with how it started, by going into the details of the backstory, going into the why, because people do care about the why. You see that a lot in the product, like, hey, why is this product better? Why should I buy this as opposed to whatever Procter Gamble product? And it's the story. And sometimes that story's very short and sweet and it's like, I have a kid, so I made a kid, kid's product. But that's enough for somebody to create relationship with the story behind the product. And that apply, yeah, that can apply to any industry. Like I started with tech and definitely in the products.

Let's talk a little bit about SignalRaptor because obviously you have a successful full-service agency, but what was the gap that you were seeing in the market? That you said, oh, there's another opportunity here that we should go ahead and, and build?

So we talked to a lot of people and we saw the need because of those conversations, because we're coming from the purpose-driven angle. We care about the story. Like we, we talk about it here and there of like, hey, we're storytellers. I, I think that's a broader PR thing, but like, that's really what it is. And we had so many people approaching us that did not have the budget for the agency because on the agency side, you're paying for time, you're paying for experience, and you're paying for those relationships that we talked about earlier. And there's a hard cost for us. And so often the smaller teams, the 1 to 5 person teams, don't have that. It's just a cash flow issue. There's so many good causes on the nonprofit side. There's so many cool products that have a great backstory. It's like, hey, my dog was sick and I was taking care of my aunt. She passed away. She made me promise her on her deathbed to make this brand a thing. That's a real story, but it's hard to help them if they don't have the foundation laid from the agency perspective. So we had so many conversations with that. So between price point And just stage of the business. Yeah. People weren't able to work with us that we wanted to work with. And so that, that's like the foundation of the idea. How do we create something that somebody who's just building out or can needs consistency? Because that's another thing, like people love doing these PR pushes. We have 10 years of data now. And that data tells a very clear story. Doesn't matter what level the brand is at, if they aren't consistent, their opportunities are not going to be as good. And, you know, we can push really, really hard and get a bunch of media, but that will fade away in a month, 2, 3 months. And unless somebody's consistently putting their brand out there to the world, to the media, it's very easy to lose that momentum. And so we wanted another The other side of it was we wanted people to be consistent and we'd rather spread their budget out over 2 years than 2 months. But in order to do that, we had to use arbitrage, we had to use technology, and it was right around the start of ChatGPT's launch that we looked at doing Raptor. So having the little bit of experience in the development side, And Heather had had a project previously called Press Demand as well. And so we had these couple experiences in that side of things and we said, okay, this is going to be huge. Saw the potential of kind of what it's doing now with AgentX. We saw that potential then and we said, PR software kind of suck. I don't know how many you've used. I've looked at a lot of them.. And, uh, you know, we want to combine our own internal needs, how we run, how in our systems, and we want to combine it in a way that's accessible to more brands who have great stories to tell. And so we started building Raptor and, and to tie it into our background, we want it to be service first and software second. And so we've taken that approach from the start. Because we, like, our core DNA is serving other people and we wanted that to be included in it. Now we are about to launch just the software version of it, which, yeah, it was gonna happen eventually, but it, it's given us the chance to build a lot of relationships that, you know, might've ended after a call over the past couple years.

Hmm. Fantastic. So the model has been done with you. And now you're moving to Done With You, or you can just use the software.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. The software's on the usage side, it's gonna be somebody who probably has that person internally on their team.

Mm-hmm.

And that can be at a lot of different levels. But you know, they have an assistant that does outreach. It, it's not a tool I'd necessarily put just in the hands of the founder unless they have experience in the media. But it, it's a management tool for communications and version 3, I think this is the first time I'm talking about it. Version 3 is gonna be coming out at our 1-year software launch anniversary, July 4th. And that's kind of the same timeline as the rollout for the dedicated community part, which we, the community's been the best part to me. We get together as community and there's a school-like page and Then we'll also be launching some new offerings that I, I'll let my team design the social post for that first before I actually announce them. And it, it's just been cool what we've been able to do over the past couple months because Open Claw was the huge breakthrough and that changed a lot of stuff. Like we just finally shifted everything to Claude and like I got a text message, it was like 3 days ago. And then I got a text message yesterday, Grok's like, oh, we have agents now. And I'm like, okay, two days too late. Yeah. But yeah, it's really cool. And it's going to be so easy for us to put our systems into all this Agentek stuff that's come out and have people use that very easily for themselves. And then other agencies as well will be opening that up because we've had our version of it that has all the agency control stuff. But now we're building that to be handed off to other agencies cuz we spent the past year since the launch fixing all of the things that were wrong. So that's what we spent our time doing and, uh, we're, we're excited about where it's gone.

Mm, fantastic. So let's talk about AI because that has been reshaping marketing and communications. There are people who do all of their pitching using AI tools, whether that's really effective or not. So how have you seen it affect your business? And do you think that AI helps the average entrepreneur in PR, or do you think it hurts them?

Yeah, that's the exact challenge that we're seeking to fix. Without the system behind it, it will break everything very quickly. Now, like I said, we're on the service side of it. We're double-checking every usage of AI and making sure that it's correct. And we've made mistakes with that. Like, because there's the human factor. But we're trying to build the system so that you can put in your information and it does the right thing. And so I, I've had the idea for the automated pitching for a long time. Yeah. But we've never actually used it because it's not as effective yet. But one of the cool things that will happen as we get more and more people onto Raptor is the It's not a network effect, but the training cycle will greatly shorten as instead of feeding our 100 pitches a week, or I don't know the real number, we're feeding thousands and thousands of pitches a week from different brands, from different agencies, and that will improve the system. And it, it, the context is what OpenClog brought in and it hasn't made it to the end user products yet. You can use it inside Claude or now Groq as an agent tool, but you have to build that tool yourself. So we're getting rid of that learning curve because it, like, if you're not technically knowledgeable, then that is a challenge because even for my dev guys, it's still a challenge. And so this next round of SaaS products, whether it's us with PR or any of the new ones coming out, they're going to have that layer where it is just, I want to do this. Here's my information, make it happen. And so it'll be cool as you see new stuff coming out.

So, yeah. Nice. Well, we're going to obviously have links to both organizations. Exciting that you have some new rollouts and some new potential offerings in the works that we'll have to make sure to look out for. If there was one last piece of advice that you would give to anybody who is looking to get publicity or start their entrepreneur journey or both, what would you tell them to do?

Oh, I had, I had something and then you're like looking to get PR. I mean, everybody talks about authenticity and I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding about that, what that means. And it means something different on social than it does with telling your story, even though you can tell your story on social. Yes, you have to make it you and you have to speak in your voice. That's the authentic that people sort out very, very easily. But you also have to make it intentional in what you're trying to say and who you're trying to say it to and what the outcome you're going for is. Without those elements, you're kind of speaking into the wind. And some people get lucky and they're like just telling their story and they're like, I wanna do this. But that's part of the message is what, why, how, answering all the questions along the way. And so when you're being authentic, you need to have intentionality with that as you're trying to create an outcome because it, you have to figure out how the story relates to the outcome.

Absolutely. Wonderful. And then do you have a favorite quote, mantra, poem, family motto, verse?

I was trying to think of this beforehand. I can give you the verse because I have a verse, but I was bouncing back and forth. I mean, I appreciate what the founders did. I mean, there's a lot that's happened since then, but I'll use this one. Freedom of speech is so important, and I forget who said this, but without it, we're led like sheep to the slaughter. I'm butchering that figuratively, but, you know, our goal is to serve people. And so my verse for a long time has been, let your light shine so that others may see your good works and praise your Father. And again, not verbatim, but we want to be a light of positivity. That's what we try and live with Publicity for Good. There's a lot of people out there that are creating the divide, that are saying, like, for example, you'll work with this person, not this person. That's not how we approach it. We want people who are making the world a better place, and we want to highlight those stories, and we want to be a part of bringing people together and the positive conversation and not tearing society apart.

So Oh, that's really important these days. Um, and a very worthy mission. So thank you for that. It's been fun getting the backstory, the, the foundational aspects of any building any business. Because we do, I've had people on, we've talked about the PR side of things and not as much about the foundation and the operational side and then the ups and downs of owning a business and figuring out what really works and what's going to fulfill your needs as business owners and, and fill your souls, right, as people. Absolutely. Yeah. So Austin Holmes, thank you so much for being on the show, and thank you to everybody who's watching this show or listening to it. I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey, very soon. And we'll have all the links for Austin's companies, Publicity for Good, Signal Raptor, and everything in between in the show notes. So if you are a company that thinks that you'd be a good fit for their services, check them out. And you also, we didn't even talk about your podcast, but we can also link to that in the show notes if you'd like us to.

Very cool.

Amazing. And you want to give a little plug, a little plug for you?

Yeah, I mean, I started Over Pressure just to help guys as they're getting out of the military, showing that there is a path, that there's hope. Of course we talk about communications because that's what I do, and entrepreneurship because that's what I do. But it's really there because there's a serious mental health crisis and I want to give guys, hey, there's a hope. You can do this. Go find your next mission.

Nice. That is really important. I actually have a podcast course at University of Southern California, and one of my students started a military podcast to talk about just different options that you have when you get out for funding for school and for things, resources that people might not know about. So the work you're doing is really important on that side as well. So thank you for, for that.

Yeah, I, I do it for those guys, not for me.

So yeah, absolutely. All right, well, thank you again and thank you to everybody. And, uh, leave us a rating review. Let us know what you think, what you'd like to see more of. All of that's so important for us to get that feedback. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.